‘Once again, the University is recognising the most outstanding Postgraduate Taught student with a prize of £1,000.

This year the winner is Bonnie McGill, who is graduating with an MA Children’s Literature. The prize is awarded to the student who has most consistently been able to demonstrate outstanding academic achievement throughout their programme of study. To be eligible for the award students must achieve marks in the distinction category for each of their modules. The winning student is then the one who scores the highest mark for their dissertation or project.

Bonnie came out top both in terms of her dissertation, achieving 95% and her overall weighted average, achieving 90%. Her MA results are the highest ever awarded in the thirty-year history of the MA in Children’s Literature.

This is a quite outstanding achievement and we are therefore delighted to congratulate Bonnie.

We are also delighted that Bonnie has been awarded a University of Reading Studentship to continue her PhD studies here on Literary Theory and Quantum Theory.’

Warmest congratulations to Bonnie!

About Professor Karín Lesnik-Oberstein:

Professor Karín Lesnik-Oberstein is a transdisciplinary critical theorist, which means she asks questions about ideas in many disciplines that are not usually regarded as questions that can possibly be asked at all. Most of her work has done this in relation to childhood, considering how researchers make claims about what children are like and then base their research on such claims. Researchers (and anyone) frequently make claims about characteristics of childhood based on what they remember, or what they hear others remembering, about themselves as children, or based on what they observe about children. But both memory and observation are subject to interpretation and lead to a wide variety of claims about what children are ‘really’ like. Karín has also analysed similar claims around gender, for instance in her (edited) volume The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (2007; paperback reprint 2011) and Disability in her recent (edited) volume Rethinking Disability Theory and Practice: Challenging Essentialism (2015). Karín is currently researching ideas about childhood and transsexuality/ transgender.